


The Wind Will Ruin Everything

by magistrate



Series: (and you live with a ghost) [1]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Families/Chosen Families, Gen, H/C Bingo 2013, H/C bingo, Has Its Way With Canon, Home, Missing Scenes, Probably Not Procedurally Accurate, There Is No Arc, loss of home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-21 14:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/901537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/pseuds/magistrate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal's left home a few times, in his life. Most of the time, though, he's blinked and home's been gone.  (Spoilers through 4x04 (Parting Shots) of White Collar.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. St. Louis to NYC

**Author's Note:**

> _So we let go of the ones_   
>  _who called us by our names. We make_   
>  _ourselves new names by tracing letters_   
>  _in a sand tray with sharp stones._   
>  _This is called Patience or Practicing_   
>  _Solitude or The Wind Will Ruin Everything_   
>  _but what does it matter..._
> 
>  
> 
> – "Match", Brynn Saito

**(i) St. Louis to NYC**

Home for fifteen years was a brick building in Dogtown with flower boxes out front, stuffed with bluebells and lilies-of-the-valley and other flowers that hung their heads. He didn't remember the three years before that, in some hole-in-the-wall apartment in DC, and _after_ that, well, that was a different story.

For fifteen years he walked the same streets and played or lazed or flirted in the same parks, and found Ellen in the yard on the weekends, on her knees, with her gloved hands in the earth. She was always coaxing something to grow, which the kid known as Danny Brooks didn't see the appeal in – he liked things like art and magic tricks and pool, hobbies dependent on his own skills or, when there were other living things involved, hobbies on people whose heads he could get inside.

Home for most of those years was Ellen, because it wasn't long before he'd figured out that his mother had packed her bags and moved to somewhere in the back of her head, and she wasn't letting him move with her.

Ellen's apartment was in the Central West End, and had a balcony, but no yard. He tended to walk over there after school or on the weekends; eat pizza at her diningroom table, badger her out to the shooting range in High Ridge, or talk her around to telling him stories about a life she wasn't supposed to admit to having. Every year he got a little better at talking people around, and measured how good he'd gotten against Ellen; she figured it out, of course, and started regarding it with amused tolerance.

"You could be a great salesman," she said, at one point, scrubbing down a glass casserole dish, evening sun coming in through the window. Danny was hanging out by the end of the counter with a dishtowel, because Ellen didn't let him wash the dishes when he had cooked, and he was a better cook than she was. He'd learned from the best. Cooking was just about the only way to get his mother to rejoin reality, these days. "Really. Your poor marks wouldn't have a chance."

"I could be a great detective," Danny offered.

Ellen looked at him, and her smile cooled. It was still there, but she was forcing it to be there, and he never talked her around to explaining that.

"You could be," she agreed.

Ellen seemed to enjoy telling him about her life in DC. Airing out a part of her past no one but he and his mother were ever allowed to know. She told him about busts and searches, trials and investigations, and the assorted madnesses of being a woman on the force in the 1970s, and one particular favorite story that ended with his father taking a dunk in the Potomac while she commandeered the Beetle from a senator's aide to run down the gang leader who'd stolen their patrol car.

She never told him the story of his father's death.

He made it to eighteen before he learned why.

And at that point, he ran.

* * *

He didn't leave Ellen's apartment with the intention to leave the state, but as soon as the option presented itself, every other option seemed like a dodge.

The St. Louis - New York line had a bus going out ten minutes after he arrived at the station, and Danny –  _Neal_ , apparently; that's what Ellen told him, though he wasn't sure how much he should trust anything told to him, really – bought a ticket and walked onto it and ignored the concerned glances of travelers who saw an angry-looking young man with no luggage on an interstate line and jumped to the obvious conclusion. By the time they started moving he'd stuck himself in a seat in the back corner and put his knees up against the seat in front of him, and was hopefully radiating enough _leave me alone_ to insulate him for the trip. It lasted all of seventeen minutes before a woman edged back to talk to him.

"Hi," she tried.

He turned to glare at her.

She wasn't that much older than him – mid-20s _maybe_ , but in professional dress, brown hair up in a no-nonsense bun. She gave him an awkward smile. "Are you all right?"

He glared at her some more, trying to think of a way to chase her off without causing a scene that would draw more unwanted attention.

"I work with youth in the St. Louis area," she offered. "If there's something you're having trouble with..."

 _Have to convince her there's no chance of this conversation working out_ , he thought, and cursed at her in French until she gave him a lost look, then an even more uneasy smile, then backed away.

That gave him a vicious thrill of satisfied amusement, but it didn't last long. It vanished like everything else, into the undercurrent of anger which was swallowing everything.

The ride was long, and it took barely two hours for him to start regretting his lack of foresight in failing to bring any form of entertainment. Even his application for the police academy had been left at Ellen's. He could have drawn a visual novel in the margins, with all the time he had; instead, he just sat in his seat and wallowed in anger, and got out when the bus stopped for breaks, and fell asleep through the night and woke up with a crick in his neck and a pounding headache, and sat and wallowed in his anger some more.

The anger didn't disappear by the time he got to New York City. It had become a sort of monotonous droning in the back of his head and the tension in his shoulders, and it had twisted up his stomach and made him feel vaguely ill, but it was as present as ever.

He was pretty sure that you were expected to cool down and see the error of your ways after stepping out into a new city and realizing you'd just taken the nuclear option on whatever problems you were getting away from. He was pretty sure you were expected to suffer a crisis of conscience; go running back home again. Instead, every minute on the bus had just increased the pressure-cooker anger to the point where he stepped off the bus and was just about ready to set fire to the thing, like Cortés.

The anonymity of the New York City streets absorbed him like he was nothing, and he let the controlled chaos close over his head. He wound up checking himself into a motel, and two days later, when he was still waking up with knots in his shoulders and a bitter taste in the back of his throat, he made a decision.

He didn't know exactly how one went about leaving witness protection; in the end he wrote a letter, official as he could make it, stating his intent to leave the program, signed it, and mailed it to the US Marshals. No one came after him to drag him back to St. Louis or give him a new placement, and a few days later, a certified package came to the motel in the mail – proof that the Marshals could still find him, if they cared enough to try.

The package contained a birth certificate for a kid named Neal Bennet and a social security card, and just like that, Danny Brooks was dead.

* * *

Days in New York City were all noise and crowds and people, and nights weren't much better. Danny hadn't done much traveling – school trips, here and there, but summer vacations were spent at home, and it wasn't as though his mother had been eager to give him a car – and Neal spent the first days trying not to be jostled in the crowd and trying not to rubberneck at the buildings and trying to be the same guy who could charm his way through or out of anything in the Gateway to the West. He spent the first nights pressing his face into the motel pillow and cursing the noise outside for never slowing in this city that never slept, and cursing himself for floundering and not knowing what he was doing here or where he was headed, and cursing the ground for not being solid beneath his feet. Surely, if there was one thing the ground was obligated to be.

A week passed. Then a few more days. Then at three AM on a hazy Thursday when the same room that was always too hot without AC was too cold without heat and he had his face pressed into the bed, trapped with his own breath forced back over his cheeks by the mattress, with the noise from outside pushing through his hands and the pillow over his head and the blood running through his ears, impersonal and invasive as the press of shoulders and elbows on the subway, the resolve he'd thought was made of iron a week and a half ago ruptured and gave out and flooded himself with enough homesickness to make him sick a couple different ways. He wanted St. Louis pizza with Ellen at the diningroom table and the mindless excitement and anticipation of the last days of senior year and the uncertainty of what was to come. But he was all too aware that he wanted the lie, the remembered security of knowing his own name and having a plan for his future and footsteps to follow in and the pride of being told that the US Marshals who checked in avery month or two were doing it out of respect for his father, who'd died a hero. There was no getting any of that back.

But still, but still, but still.

Punching the mattress only got him so far, and he refused to break down crying in a motel room no matter how far he was from home, but by the time morning rolled around and the sun stretched taunting fingers through the motel window, he'd decided to go back.

Not to stay. He'd just go back for a weekend, eat at a few of the chains that didn't exist in the Big Apple, check himself into a hotel somewhere where taxis weren't honking and people weren't yelling and conversations didn't go on and on at all hours through the night. He'd just see that the city was still standing and he could get his head on straight and start, maybe, planning out a life that wasn't built on layers of falsehoods and half-truths.

He had more money than either his mother or Ellen knew about, from years of pool and other extracurriculars, and a few experimental days in the subway and the park here told him it'd be as easy to get more. He didn't have to have it all figured out. He could waste a little time.

Time, he thought, was one thing he had plenty of.

* * *

St. Louis was the same when he came back to it, big and mostly low and open and full of sky and light, compared to the bristling skyline of Manhattan. He took familiar buses on familiar streets and walked the last few blocks to a red brick building with flower boxes in the yard and a FOR SALE sign standing blunt by the sidewalk.

For a moment it didn't compute, and then his eyes went to the empty driveway and the open, empty garage; he walked up to the front window and looked in to see bare floors and empty walls. Everything was gone. He'd turned his back for a second and the only home and family he'd had just slipped away.

He'd thought he'd just casually walk by, and leave again. Instead there he was, staring dumbly at the house's emptiness, and it occurred to him that he should have seen this coming.

You couldn't just leave your family and come home whenever you feel like it, not when your father was a murderer and he was the blue in your eyes, the blood in your veins.

He didn't stand there long, with the people out walking their dogs and the cars of middle-class folk with their solid, domestic lives glinting in the afternoon light. Not long enough for someone to recognize the boy who grew up there and ask him why his mother had moved so suddenly, why he wasn't with her, wherever she was. He turned his back on the house. Left its blood-red brick and its flower boxes, one of which had been cleared of bluebells and replaced with another small, blue flower, this one showing its face to the sun.


	2. NYC to prison

**(ii) NYC to prison**

Sitting in the bus terminal with the sun too hot on his shoulders, gum wrappers idly blowing across the concrete floor, waiting on the line that'd take him back to New York, he told himself _Come on. It's not like it was **really** home, anyway._ He wrapped his hands around a paper cup full of fast-food coffee, too bitter, too sour, and told himself _You didn't want to move back in anyway; what's the big deal?_

He had money, he had ID, he had skills and resources no one could take away from him; it wasn't like he was homeless, wasn't like he didn't know how to find a place to sleep that evening. Hell, he could get mugged for everything he had, and he'd still probably come out okay before too long. Pick a few pockets, find a place to shoot some billiards. What had he lost?

He told himself, _No looking back, this time._

It was a long time before he found those last blue flowers in a botanical garden, with a little steel plaque that named them _forget-me-nots._

It was no time at all before he realized that he hadn't so much left home as given home half a chance to leave him. And that, it had taken with gusto.

* * *

New York City didn't seem to give a damn if he came or went, and the first motel he'd stayed in was booked full the second time he tried it – though that was no great loss. By sunset he was flopped on his stomach on a bed somewhere in the Lower East Side, with a carton of Chinese take-out at his elbow, trying to figure out how to purge the name _Bennet_ from the documents the Marshals had sent him. (Not a hero, a _murderer_ , and Neal, not _Danny_ , would be damned if he was going to walk around with that name on his back. He'd take the name of the person who lied to him for most of his life before that. _née Caffrey_ , said the birth certificate, not _Brooks_ , so that would do.)

He thought through the process, read everything he could get his hands on about how names changed, discarded a dozen ideas, and eventually came up with a plan.

The weak point of most systems was their human operators, and a clerk entering data in a DMV in Harlem wasn't going to spend a lot of time chasing down records in St. Louis. He called the St. Louis circuit court and convinced a clerk he was doing a school project on some famous St. Louis resident who'd changed her name, then sweet-talked the guy into sending him a copy of the name change order for a visual aid. Once he got that, it wasn't hard to put together his own. No judge had ever signed off on it, no record of it existed back in Missouri, but it looked official enough.

Neal Bennet had already been casually blotted from existence once, and Danny Brooks had vanished back into the nothing from which he'd been imagined.

Maybe Neal Caffrey could do better.

* * *

Neal Caffrey's first acts were scrambling to stay afloat. Navigating New York's nightmare housing market, putting together fake paystubs and references, and making sure he was bringing home enough take to pay for hotel rooms and printing equipment and eventually a storage unit to store that in, for cab fare and food and tickets to museums and shows so he could drown out any last thoughts about St. Louis. Keeping constantly, outrageously busy was the only way he kept himself sane.

Later he wasn't able to put his finger on how he'd escalated from pay stubs to bonds, from minor cons in the park to getting dragged into some other guy's plan to bilk several billion dollars from a famous fund manager, any more than he could put his finger on the escalation from making his own bus passes to faking a name change. It always seemed like the natural next step, either in his day-to-day survival or in creating a _Neal Caffrey_ who wasn't a Bennet or a Brooks. But, hey, it worked, and after a few months it was a comfortable routine. Yeah, it bore no resemblance to what he'd had in St. Louis, but that was kind of the point.

And then there was the matter of the FBI agent who was investigating him.

Neal was sitting on a secondhand couch in a drafty studio apartment he kept meaning to patch up with caulk or paint or something – couldn't be that hard, could it? – when Mozzie came in with news that Burke had been looking into every bit of mocked-up life that had been attached to the bank records of Neal's cashed bonds. "Fortunately, he doesn't seem to have made the Dan Brooks-Nick Halden connection," he said.

"Well, that's good to know," Neal said. "What about the Neal Caffrey connection?"

"Oh, that one either," Mozzie said, with a dismissive handwave that suggested that, hey, that name wasn't involved in an active con, it'd be no big loss to burn it. "But he did look into that motel on Division Street, and I hear he's been digging up receipts. You, my friend, definitely have an admirer. Fortunately, he doesn't have much to go on."

Mozzie flipped a folded-up piece of paper through the air at him, and Neal caught it and unfolded it while Mozzie went to pour them each some wine. Sure enough, that was a copy of the motel receipt from when he'd come to New York the second time, and hadn't gotten new ID worked up yet. It wasn't much – just his signature on the bottom of a check-in form – and he doubted the name _Daniel Brooks_ was rare enough that it would yield any useful information, but it was still surreal to think of it getting logged into an FBI report somewhere, one assumed alias for a forger whose real identity was unknown.

Well, if they were searching for his real identity, all he could think was _Good luck with **that**._

"You know," he said, "this is the most interest I think anyone's ever taken in my life."

Mozzie gave a short, sharp laugh. "Pray it's the most interest anyone ever does."

Neal looked at him. Mozzie set the wine down in front of him, and while it wouldn't be enough to get him fuzzy-headed – he wasn't quite to the point where he trusted himself to be fuzzy-headed around Mozzie, or, more accurately, where he trusted Mozzie to be around _him_ while he was – but just sitting there it was threatening to make him maudlin, for reasons other than the alcohol. Drinking wine just made him think of Ellen, whose strategy to prevent underage drinking seemed to have been showing him that alcohol wasn't really all that exciting and was better in moderation anyway. She'd just about gotten him to the point where he could see why people drank wine, but he remained convinced that beer was a prank someone had pulled on civilization at some point and civilization had never wised up to the joke.

He hadn't told Mozzie that, but Mozzie seemed determined to finish his education anyway.

"We're putting the cap on the level of personal involvement with my life at the level of the FBI agent chasing me?" Neal asked, because that seemed deeply wrong.

"A good con man is a ghost," Mozzie explained. "He sweeps in, stays only long enough to establish himself for his job, then vanishes, leaving none the wiser."

Neal stared for a moment, trying to work out if that was a quote or not, and decided he didn't care. "God, that's depressing. What happens if you want to have a wife and kids some day?"

"Uh-uh." Mozzie didn't even hesitate. "No way. That sort of life is just another con, Neal."

"Having a family and a life is a con?"

" _This_ is a life." Mozzie's finger plunked down on the intel he'd brought in, the pile of collected tipoffs and rumors that Mozzie spent his days collecting so that Neal could know everything, could feed Adler enough to gain his trust. The pile would be burned after Neal went to sleep, and its ashes probably added to the fertilizer regimen for the collection of variously-legal plants Mozzie had given himself stewardship of in various parts of the city.

Mozzie's behavior toward a lot of things was a little suspect.

"Guys like us don't get picket fences," he said. "We get priceless antiquities and excitement and intrigue. We change our names and flit from city to city, leaving no trace of ourselves behind. Because as soon as we do, people like your federal stalker catch up to you, and then the only house you get is the big house."

"Maybe if you're good enough–" Neal began.

"It's not for us," Mozzie said, voice like a door slamming. "It's a fairytale, like the rest of the straight and narrow. We're the ones smart enough to see past it."

Neal didn't bring that up again for a while.

* * *

Nick Halden wasn't designed to prove Mozzie wrong, but that looked like something he was good for.

Nick Halden got a job paying more in a month than Neal Caffrey, Danny Brooks or the short- and infrequently-lived Neal Bennet had ever seen in one place at once. _Nick Halden_ flirted with a girl brighter and sharper than a cut sapphire and accepted suits and tutelage from New York's most spectacular businessman.

Nick Halden got snowed in under his own reticence and confidence and his whole life disappeared around him. So fuck that.

* * *

Okay, so Neal Caffrey had some work to do, and little chance of changing Mozzie's mind, but he made a good go of it. He and Mozzie and Kate worked well together, and even if Mozzie regarded any romantic feelings with suspicion and mistrust, he did seem to realize that Kate herself was an asset. Eventually.

And that was great – months went by, and he could relax more into this strange little family he'd accrued around himself. Kate, Mozzie and himself, living by their wits in a world that didn't give a damn about them, dancing through the rhythms of the New York days like the city was made for them, in on their jokes, until one day he relaxed too far and tried to live by his wits with Kate.

This was the way the world always ended: not with a bang but with an empty house, or an "I'm not going to Copenhagen," and an angry "You just tried to _con_ me." Just another gut decision.

Afterward, after Kate refused the Copenhagen job, it occurred to him (too late) that he should have asked Mozzie to come. It was a three-man job, and it fell apart between him and Alex; they shouldn't have been stubborn enough to try, but they were both stubborn and now they were paying for it.

But Mozzie hadn't come, hadn't tried to force his way in, hadn't even blinked when Neal had said goodbye. Just told him, "Good. I hate to say 'I told you so,' but maybe this will be good for you. Think of it as a chance to get your head back in the game. The life is the life, Neal, and if you want to succeed..."

They hadn't succeeded, and he left Alex in a French hospital and barely limped away. And when he finally made it home there was no _For Sale_ sign, but Kate was gone.

Mozzie saw nothing notable in the fact.

She hadn't left forget-me-nots and neither had he, but there was always the chance she'd just run and disappeared too well – that maybe if he didn't sell the house and change his name she'd find her way back for pizza, one day. But even as he thought it he knew it was a forced, false parallel. Mozzie had said that FBI Special Agent Peter Burke had better be the one person in the world most invested in Neal's life, and as much as Neal thought that was crap, the world seemed to be on Mozzie's side.

* * *

Months passed, and months stretched into seasons, and Neal sent up every flare he could think of, trying to get Kate's attention without catching the attention of the FBI. Mozzie vacillated between praising him for the ever-more-elaborate cons he ran and trying to re-orient his priorities for running them.

He returned to New York City. Against Mozzie's advice, of course, though it didn't stop Moz from following him back, hoping to keep him out of too much trouble on Burke's home turf. But chatter had put Kate in the New York City area, and much as Mozzie was twitching to get out the moment they got in, Neal did what he'd become used to doing, whenever Mozzie expressed concern about his obsessive hyperfocus on Kate. He ignored him.

True to Mozzie's prediction, it took Burke no time at all to start hearing rumors that the quickly-becoming-infamous Neal Caffrey was back in town. It only took three days for the first poster to pop up, and the noose started tightening. The only reason it didn't tighten faster was that Burke seemed unconvinced that these rumors had any more truth than any of the dozens they'd sown all across the world.

Mozzie still had safehouses in the city, and one week in, Neal was pouring over the newspapers, just to keep familiar with the lay of the land. Mozzie was getting ready to run some small job out in Queens and Neal was halfway through the classifieds when one ad jumped out at him.

_[Lost painting, "Boy with Policewoman", if found, return to–]_

He skimmed the address and hit the phone number before his attention hitched, and he went back to read it again. Then he looked up from the newspaper. "Mozzie," he said, heart now beating fast. "Louisville Avenue. Is there a Louisville Avenue in New York City?"

Mozzie's eyes unfocused for a moment, his mind cross-checking against its own encyclopedic knowledge. "No," he said, after a moment. "Why? Should there be?"

Neal shoved the newspaper at him, stabbing his finger at the classified ad. "That address," he said, and Mozzie caught the newspaper and furrowed his brow at it.

"Louisville Avenue," he read. "With the ZIP code for Roosevelt Island. You think you've stumbled onto someone's coded message?"

"It's a code for _me_ ," Neal said. "That address. That's where I grew up." _In St. Louis._

Mozzie blinked. "Wait, what?"

"I need a drop box," he said. Mozzie gave him a long, odd look.

"...don't you already have several?"

"A new one," Neal said. "A clean one. And a burner phone." He scrambled off the couch, which pushed Mozzie into an answering scramble, meeting him at the door.

"Neal, your name's been in the papers," he said. "People suspect you're here. And, um, 'Boy with Policewoman?' This could be a trap!"

"No one knows about that time of my life," Neal said. "No one knows what street I grew up on, Moz. And if they saw my name in the paper, only – two, maybe three people would put together 'Neal Caffrey' with the person I was then."

And then he was out the door, down the hall, running for the chance at touching a life he'd had, once upon a time.

* * *

When he came back Mozzie was already out, which was fine with him. He snatched up the paper again and dialed on his new phone, trying not to hope, the air trapped in his chest.

The number rang long enough to sharpen the tension, tighten his hand on the phone, and then cut, suddenly, to an active line. _"Hello, who is this?"_

Ellen.

She sounded older, but it didn't matter – five, ten, fifteen, _fifty_ years on, and he was sure he'd recognize her voice.

But he couldn't seem to find his own, and flipped the phone closed.

Two hours later, when Mozzie got back in with a bottle of rosé tucked under his elbow, Neal had already paid off a lady who knew a guy at the newspaper who could dig out whoever had placed that ad, and he'd set up by the window where the good light was with a pack of postcard-sized sheets of watercolor paper, and started a quick, impressionistic piece of a red-brick house with flowerboxes in the yard. He couldn't sign it, obviously; couldn't put anything in words that Ellen could identify him by – computers were sorting the mail, these days, and Mozzie insisted that computers were all programmed to inform for the Man. But the house would be enough. It had to be enough.

"That's, er, more domestic than your usual work," Mozzie ventured.

Neal grinned at him like a loon until he backed away.

"This is worrying, Neal," he said. "Worrying. You know that?"

"Can you address this for me when it's dry?" Neal said. "You've got a wider range of handwritings to choose from than I do."

"Sure," Mozzie agreed. "Want any particular handwriting? I recently perfected a very nice J. Robert Oppenheimer."

"Doesn't matter. Anyone legible." He switched brushes, and added a suggestion of a neighbor's dog. The dog had liked Ellen. Maybe it would be nice to see a familiar form.

"Or I could do an Alfred Hitchcock. Always a fan favorite." Mozzie set the rosé on the counter. "Come on, spill. Who is this, and what's going on? Who am I addressing this to?"

"Her name is Ellen," Neal said.

"Ellen," Mozzie repeated. "Old fling? If it gets your mind off Kate–"

"Mozzie. Ew. No." Neal paused with his brush over one of the wells in his palette, so he could shake his head in Mozzie's direction. "She's an old friend. A mentor."

"Ah," Mozzie said. "Should I be jealous?"

Neal gave him a _really?_ look.

"Just asking," Mozzie said.

* * *

A postcard came back, with a picture of Roosevelt Island and Ellen's familiar, precise cursive. She was avoiding identifying marks, too; it was addressed to the PO Box, not to _Danny Brooks_ or _Neal Caffrey_ , and signed only _E._ , but it was her, unmistakably her.

"You going to visit her?" Mozzie asked, watching Neal's expression as he read and re-read the carefully non-incriminating words. Neal shook his head.

"I don't want to bring her to the attention of the FBI," he said, and was grateful that Mozzie was the sort who'd never question that. And he didn't add _and she's probably still being monitored by the US Marshals,_ because Mozzie didn't need that heart attack, and explaining wasn't something he was over-interested in.

Mozzie sighed, and Neal gave him a questioning look.

"I hate to say it," Mozzie said, "but our window on leaving the city without stuffing you in the trunk of a car is closing. Burke has people keeping an eye out for you at airports, bus, and train stations. The other day, Fiona said she heard a cabbie talking about this hotshot FBI-wanted-list forger who was supposed to be hiding out in the city. A _cabbie_ , Neal."

"Cabbies talk about everything," Neal said. "Hey, I talked to someone, yesterday – said that there had been a few sheets of rare stamps floating around. Kate was good at stamps; can you check it out?

"You're grasping at straws, man."

Neal leaned forward. "Please, Moz."

"It's not going to pay off," Mozzie said. "Look, you can send this 'Ellen' friend the address to a new drop. And maybe it would be best to look for Kate again once the FBI investigation dies down."

"Burke's been looking for me for three years," Neal said. "Do you honestly think the investigation is going to die down?"

Mozzie was silent.

"Everything I need is in New York City, right now," Neal said.

* * *

It paid off.

Mozzie came back with information on the girl selling stamps, and passed him the tip just as it had been written down for him. Mozzie said it was a trap; Neal had no reason to believe it wasn't a trap, but he went anyway. If Kate wasn't there, well, he was good at running. If she was–

She was.

* * *

And of course Burke showed up the instant he found Kate again, and Neal couldn't find that surprising. He'd walked into this with his eyes open, and Burke just swaggered in, wearing an off-the-shelf suit and a cat-got-the-cream look, and arrested him.

Neal just let out his breath and shook the man's hand, because he'd known better than to fully trust this too-good luck in the first place, and besides, by this point Burke was as much a part of his life as anyone. In a different week, he might have found that depressing. But despite – rather, because of – Burke's best efforts, Ellen had known to send up a flare for him, and he'd held Kate ever-so-briefly in his arms.

So far as these things went, he'd flown pretty high before his wings had sloughed right off.

* * *

Neal smiled and sweet-talked through his trial, and scanned the court benches for Kate. (She didn't show up for the first two days. And then she was there, quiet, near the back, a constant fixture with enigmatic eyes. Ellen never appeared, but he hadn't expected her to; people might notice, questions might be asked, and that, that wouldn't be good.) He managed to smile through his sentencing, managed to quip off an "All right, fair enough," before court was dismissed.

_Four years._

Right. There was a time when he thought he'd be putting criminals away, like this. That had gotten turned around.

Part of him was happy Ellen wasn't there to see just how turned-around things were.

Neal didn't stand until it looked like the rest of the room was standing, and then motion to the side caught his eye and he turned. Kate was there, eeling through the press of people with the practiced grace of someone who'd learned to get where she wasn't supposed to be, and then he was stepping forward into her and she was wrapping him in a hug and one or the other of them was shaking just enough to be felt, but keeping it under control.

"You _bastard_ ," Kate whispered.

He was smiling; he was terrified, trying not to let it show; he'd figure it out. He'd figured _this_ out. "Visit me?"

"You bastard," she repeated again. Then the Court Officer separated them, and led him away.

They passed Burke in the hall, getting a drink from one of the water fountains, and Neal stalled long enough to flash him a smile and say, "Good game."

Burke quirked a bemused smile back at him, and conceded "Well played."

That, Neal expected, would be the end of that. But it had been fun, while it lasted.


	3. Prison to NYC

**(iii) Prison to NYC**

Prison was not home.

Oh, it got plenty familiar. It had its quirks and its moods just the same as the city had, though compared to New York's glorious cacophony, the prison's moods were sullen and flat and strangely unsubtle for all that they barely distinguished themselves from each other. Neal had a place to put his head at the end of every day, people he saw every day, and a door that closed and locked, and that was where the resemblance to home ended.

Two months passed before he got his first visitor, and his heart almost staged a revolt and emigrated from his chest when the guard escorted him into the little cell of a visiting area and there was Kate, standing uneasily behind the chair.

"Hey," she said.

He could feel that he was grinning like an idiot, but honestly, he didn't care. "Kate," he said, and then his hand was pressing into the prison glass like he could reach through and touch her.

She gave a small, fleeting smile, and sat in the chair. He dropped his hand – too desperate? – and sat in the chair on his side of the wall.

"You came," he said.

"Yeah," she answered, like it was a meaningful exchange instead of a statement of the obvious. "I did."

There was an ill-fit silence, for a moment.

"I didn't think you would," Neal said. "Are you angry that I found you?"

She set her jaw, and didn't quite answer that. "I'm a little annoyed that you brought a dozen federal agents with guns into my space."

Where she'd been forging a Raphael, and who knew what else. Neal grimaced. "Would it help if I said they brought me into your space?"

"Not really." She kept his gaze, eyes absolute and unyielding. "Neal, I didn't want you to find me."

He winced, and looked away.

She hesitated for a moment, and went on: "I didn't want to talk to you. I thought that if I left, I could finally work out how I felt about you. Without you getting in the way."

He made himself smile, forced out a quick facsimile of an acknowledging chuckle. "Did you come to any conclusions?" he asked, looking back up at her face.

Then it was her turn to look down, then back up at him. "No," she said. "Everything – I think this is something we have to talk through. So here I am."

"I'm glad you're here," he said.

"I want to find a way to make this work," she admitted, and his heart did one or two things he wasn't sure it was intended to. "But what we had before? I don't know how honest that was. And if we're going to do this, I need honesty. Between us, Neal. I have to know if you can do that."

He opened his mouth to say _yes, I can, of course I can_ , but Kate's look got sharper, harder, and he closed his mouth on the words. That was the look she had given him ages ago. _You just tried to con me._

He knew exactly what she wanted. And promising that wasn't what she wanted to hear.

This was harder than it looked, already.

He let out an uneasy laugh. "I can try," he promised. "Is that good enough? Or–" _Do I have to master the zen arts of being honest with myself and others before you'll trust me again?_

Kate watched him, studying his face, then dropped her gaze and ran a hand back behind her neck, with a chuckle that was equal parts affectionate and resigned. "We've got," she said, every word in place like a well-organized desk, "three years, and ten months." She leaned forward, resting her forehead on the glass. "And we will work on you, mister."

At that, he grinned, and a moment later Kate grinned, too; he leaned forward and rested his forehead on the cool window, where he could imagine it warmed by Kate's skin.

"I can work with that."

* * *

One thing could be said for Kate: when she set her mind on something, she stuck to it with the same relentless determination as he'd had in looking for her or Burke had in looking for him. She showed up on his visiting day every week, rain or shine.

The first few visits were awkward; a couple devolved into fights, and ended on rough apologies. But she kept coming back, and after a few months they seemed to be past that, and after a few more, the conversations had eased up out of the past, into the present, and finally up to the speculative future after Neal was out of prison and Kate–

Well, Kate didn't talk much about what she was doing, or what her own plans were. Neal had a feeling that he knew why, and it had everything to do with the camera recording them and the minimal privacy afforded by the visitor booths.

So they talked about the home they were going to make, once he got out – the publicly-digestible face of that home, anyway, with all the details of how they planned to get it carefully elided. Though, Kate had a perfectly legitimate life, once, and if she wanted him to have one, Neal thought he could make that work. Unlike Mozzie, he didn't regard the life of a con as a vocation or a destiny or a moral imperative; just the thing that had been been there for him, and worked, when all the legitimate things fell down around his ears.

They didn't talk about Mozzie, much. Neal was pretty sure that he'd regard his name shaped by either of their lips and captured on the prison tape as the theft of his soul.

In the non-Kate hours, he occasionally considered sending letters to Ellen, but always decided against it. There was only so much he could do to conceal his identity from behind bars; the prison staff tracked what mail went out, and Neal didn't quite trust any of the ones who were pliable to him not to be pliable to anyone else.

Anyway, his time was pretty well-accounted for between work and inmate politics and navigating the prison economy and learning more than he was supposed to know about the private life of guards and wardens and, on a whim, sending birthday cards to Agent Burke (because they had sort-of had a three-year professional relationship, and really, it cost nothing to be polite). And corresponding with Kate, and visiting with Kate.

He let himself look forward to it. Then he let himself get used to it, then let himself rely on it, because this was Kate, and Kate was so much better at this sort of thing than he was.

It worked well. Until five months before his sentence was up, when Kate walked in, manner stiff and cold, and told him it was over, she was leaving, she was gone.

* * *

It occurred to him, a few times, while he was planning his escape, that this might be a kind of final exam – test him, see if after all this time he was really willing to not find her when she didn't want to be found. But his gut said _No, that's wrong._ They'd covered those conversations three years ago, and Kate could be sharp-edged at times, but she wasn't cruel. His gut said _something's not right; she's in trouble, she might need your help._

It also occurred to him that he should have had a plan in place from the beginning.

When he did get out it was a month and a half later and he didn't know what he was in for. It was still a gutpunch he didn't expect, coming to someplace which had clearly once been home and had only recently been abandoned. Just an empty room and an empty bottle, a forget-me-not in the language the two of them shared.

It made no sense to him, but life had never felt obliged to.

It was a stupid, bad move, but he was still sitting there when he heard footsteps in the hall and a sardonic voice calling: "I see Kate moved out."

 _Goddamnit._ He should have seen that coming, too. _Peter Burke._

Burke walked in and made a few more passing remarks, as if he was trying to make sense of the situation just as much as Neal was. After a while he let out a breath and said, "We're gonna give you another four years, for this." He sounded almost sorry.

"I don't care," Neal said. It'd taken him more time than that to find Ellen again; what was four more years of history repeating itself?

Peter exhaled. There was an oddly Ellen-ish quality to it, a shade of _What are we going to do with you?_ , and Neal looked up at him. With prison's rigidly-uniform days blurring together, it didn't seem all that long since he'd walked into Kate's storage unit, with–

Then something caught his eye, and he found himself laughing. Burke's eyebrows jumped, and as Neal eased himself up off the floor, he said "That's the same suit you were wearing the last time you arrested me."

_Constancy, thy name is the FBI. Or my life. One or the other._

"Mm. Classics," Burke said. "Never go out of style."

 _That's one way of putting it,_ Neal thought.

Really, he was thinking: wouldn't it be something if all law enforcement types were like that. Reliable. You vanished, and they'd come after you, come drag you back by the ankle if they need to, like there was a place that you belonged and they'd make sure you got there. Not great, when the place you belonged was prison; especially not great – thinking far back, now – if the law enforcement type was a dirty cop who'd killed a man.

Still, wouldn't it be something.

* * *

Burke was right, and they did give him four more years.

But Neal was also right in gambling on one of Burke's cases and his own carefully-cultivated prison intelligence network, and he polished up his negotiating skills as much as he could in the week he had.

Peter rebuffed his first bid for freedom, and left Neal to his cell. Neal wasn't sure what changed, in the three months between then and the end of his original sentence, but something did – and before he'd come up with a way of making the reward of breaking out of prison again outweigh the _risks of breaking out again,_ a couple of dour-faced US Marshals showed up to fasten a monitoring anklet onto his leg and give him a stern rundown on the ways they'd be displeased if he even thought about circumventing it.

He successfully resisted the urge to make some kind of remark about witness protection – _It's been a while since you guys were monitoring my wellbeing_ , maybe, or _I don't suppose any of you guys ever heard of a kid named Danny Brooks?_ – and let them hand him over to the prison administration, who handed his personal effects back and showed him the door.

Outside, Burke was waiting. To take him to wherever he was meant to be.

 _Peter_ , he thought. They were working together, now; might as well get used to the fact.

* * *

A few days later, with the tracker, yes, on his ankle, Peter was walking in through a door he'd fled through again, though at least he'd got a different suit on, this time.

"You know," he remarked, with a similar sort of satisfied-cat grin, "you're really bad at this 'escape' thing."

"What can I say?" Neal offered, and didn't say _You're just about the only person I actually have to escape from._ "Cigar?"


	4. NYC to nowhere

**(iv) NYC to nowhere**

It scared him, a little, how fast he got used to the tracker. It scared him more how fast it made itself part of his mental landscape – how whenever the little voice started up in his head, saying _You could leave this any time,_ he could move his leg and feel the weight on his ankle and remind himself, No I can't. When it started up with _You could disappear; you can **always** disappear,_ he could look at Peter pouring over a case file like a dog on a scent and think, _No I can't._ Every flood of _You know better, this won't last, you'll vanish like always, you'll leave everything in the dust,_ he could drown out with sand in his ears, a steady _No I can't, no I can't, no I can't._

If he held onto that thought until the other ones stopped tempting him, or stopped threatening him, he didn't examine, and couldn't say.

* * *

Of course, there were other parts of his situation which took no getting used to at all.

June came up to eat breakfast with him, most days, on the expansive balcony which connected his rambling fourth-floor suite (and, _guest room_ , really?–she'd been selling the place short, with what Neal came to suspect, getting to know her, was a kind of coyness, because June was as quick as a whip and as sharp as a tack and had a familiar kind of mischief in her eyes when she'd learned that she could take the federal government for seven hundred a month) with the rest of the level, bringing coffee that she pressed herself and pastries that tasted true to France.

It was still a little hard to believe that she could _live_ like this; that _he_ was actually living like this, after years of snatching a night here and there, pretending on some stolen money or other, before darting back into the shadows of some crappy apartment or okay safehouse or barely-habitable bolthole and promising Kate that one day they could wake up in this kind of luxury. Here, he would go to sleep under the glow of the Manhattan skyline, rise to a four-star breakfast with five-star company, dress in a way that would make Adler (the bastard) proud, and all he had to pay was some time working with the FBI.

Not a bad trick. If Kate was there to share it, it'd be just about perfect.

Then again, life had instilled in Neal a deep-seated distrust of nearly-perfect things.

* * *

Neal had thought that it would take at least three trips off the reservation (and to the Burkes' house) for Peter to note the pattern and either give him an ultimatum or surrender to the inevitability, but the second time he showed up he was greeted by Peter at the door with his cell phone in hand and a bitter expression on his face, who said "You do know I'm encouraged to put you back in prison when I find you casually disregarding the law."

"Just wanted to get started early," Neal said.

"The Bureau is inside your radius. Your _desk_ is inside your radius. Brooklyn is not exactly known as the home of FBI investigation."

Neal shrugged and gave him an innocent look.

From further inside, Elizabeth called "Is that Neal again?", and Peter turned back to give her an exasperated look. At least, that's what Neal guessed; now Peter had his back to him, but his tone certainly supported the theory.

"Yes. The cat came back. He just _couldn't_ stay away."

Elizabeth chuckled, and a moment later she popped into Neal's line of sight. "You want some coffee, Neal?"

"I would love some," Neal said, gave Peter a _you see, there's no reason not to be polite_ look. Peter didn't look impressed, but he stepped back and let Neal over the threshold anyway.

The Burkes' house was _homey_ – the kind of home where you could walk in and feel that it had a years-long history of domestic life going on between its walls. It felt like it and its inhabitants had grown accustomed to each others' shapes. It was entirely different from the safehouses and studios he'd lived in, before. Different from June's carefully-maintained property, with its maids and housekeepers keeping everything squared away. It reminded Neal of St. Louis, and Ellen.

(It had occurred to him, a few times, to get in touch with Ellen again. She might be at the same address, might not have to go fishing with coded messages again. But he told himself it wasn't worth the risk, that if the FBI could have found her when he was running from them and would have found her if he wrote her from prison then they'd definitely find her now that he was working with them, and didn't let himself look at the other reasons he didn't want to contact her. Like not wanting to know her opinions on watching two generations of the men of his bloodline incarcerated before her. He'd started out thinking he'd get away from the lies, the history, his own pathetic yearning to be more like a man he'd never met; he'd ended up walking straight into the man's footsteps again, anyway.)

"Are you fishing for something?" Peter asked. "Are you casing the place?"

"Come on, Peter. We've known each other for, what, seven years?" Well, if you counted investigating and running from as "knowing," that was true; it certainly seemed true from Neal's perspective. "Maybe I just wanted to feel like part of the family."

He was all smiles when he said it, ribbing and hoping to get a rise out of Peter, but Peter's expression turned troubled and knowing and almost sympathetic, and Neal decided that he was never making that joke again.

* * *

Peter thought Kate was using him.

Peter thought Kate had either run out on him or was twisting him around to get at –  _something_ ; Neal wasn't entirely sure on that point, and to be fair he wasn't that invested in hearing Peter's thoughts on the matter. Peter was only seeing the parts that didn't make sense, not the history they'd had together.

Besides, the egg was on Peter's face when Fowler came into the picture. (If anyone was using anyone – _really._ )

Even when he'd been hunting Neal down, Peter had never been the enemy. There'd been too much respect on both sides, too much awareness that the game was a game. There was none of that with Fowler.

Fowler wanted to destroy them, and whether it was his influence or Neal's, he was good at the task.

* * *

When this particular life fell apart around him – Peter suspended and probably furious with him, Elizabeth scrambling to put her business back together (Humpty Dumpty, and the best Neal could do was provide a bit of glue), NYPD with an APB out for him for the burn-your-aliases-and-go-to-ground stunt he'd pulled at the consulate, Neal just counted himself lucky that he'd managed to dodge the debris. And yeah, he felt a little guilty that hey'd hit where they'd hit, but.

_But._

But Peter, after all – he was an FBI agent; he had the steadiness and stability of someone for whom life wasn't made of fraying ropes and pitted wood. He'd make it through. Without Neal around to break things, to drawn Fowler's fire, to draw scrutiny, he'd be sure to make it through.

(At least, that was the quickest way he found to silence the voice that said, _you promised_ ; to stop thinking for a moment that they were _going_ to take Fowler down together. But it was true, wasn't it? He was always the one who burned the house, even if the last time, he had burned it just by leaving.)

But there was something waiting for him. Freedom and another life, the life he'd been angling at for years.

After all the years of things rattling apart, maybe they were finally coming together.

* * *

Peter was at the airstrip.

When the mess with the music box had finished, Alex hadn't said _Don't go._ Fowler had said, _Have a nice life, Caffrey._ Mozzie, _Send me a postcard._ Elizabeth never said _You're sticking around, right?_ and June just said, _Oh, you know I don't believe in good-bye._

Peter showed up at the airstrip.

He said _I know you can walk away_ and _You're making the biggest mistake of your life_ and _You have a life right here, you have people who care about you, you make a difference, you do._ In the end, though, Neal had to wonder what kind of life you were supposed to find at the bottom of a prison sentence – and besides, he felt at home here. He'd felt at home once before, and given how that ended – him thinking he could be a lawman, and all – he couldn't trust the feeling.

But it was the first time, literally the first, where someone had come after him to drag him back to a place he _wanted_ to be.

Maybe–

Maybe there was a way to have both. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem, to sneak back to New York now and then, under cover of a new identity. Maybe he could have a new life and not completely burn the old. That was what Fowler had offered him with Mentor, wasn't it? A chance to do anything, even this.

He was about to say something approximating that, and got as far as "Peter," and then there was a roar and a percussive force like the hand of God reaching out and knocking that nonsense out of him, and fire, a snarling landbound sun and _no no no no no no no_

* * *

_No–_

 

 

* * *

 

 

_(no)_

* * *

Kate visited him in prison.

Kate _had_ visited him in prison.

Every week, like clockwork, like the rising of the sun, something he could set his watch by. It was the only calendar that meant anything. He'd told Peter once that he'd promised her a better life, and what she got was a guy locked away for four years. And she'd promised him a life on the outside, and what he'd got was to watch her–

Die.

* * *

Just over a week into his newest prison stay – and he kept coming back here, _again again again_ – the guard said he had a visitor. But it wasn't Kate, there was no chance of Kate, so he declined the visit and turned around and went back to staring at the institutionally white walls.

* * *

One week later, like the period of a pendulum, he got a visitor again. The guard didn't exactly say he didn't have a choice, but there was something in his voice which wasn't there when these were pleasant social calls, and Neal dragged himself together enough to walk out of his cell.

He had a feeling he knew who this was, anyway.

Sure enough, Peter was waiting for him in the interview room, wearing a new suit and looking decidedly federal. He didn't seem to mind too much that the banter Neal forced out was a little sharper than usual, or that he was holding himself stiff under the prison orange jumpsuit and only trying halfheartedly to make it look casual.

"Listen," Peter said. "There's a chance I can reinstate our deal." 

Neal screwed a mask onto his face and tightened those metaphorical screws until his jaw hurt, and heroically resisted mentioning that they'd done this dance once before, and that had worked out like a _hole in the head._

Not that he blamed Peter for that – for the airplane, for his latest incarceration. Not really. Though he did have to breathe around the awareness that he might have been able to see Kate again, hold her, touch her, if Peter _goddamned_ Burke hadn't been there, pressing him, cross-examining him, saving his life.

* * *

There wasn't really a choice, in the end. Or, there was, but it was a choice between rotting in prison day by day, or slipping through the cracks and hunting down whoever killed Kate while dodging the FBI and the US Marshals at the same time, or putting on the old suits and the old show and the old side projects of him and Mozzie, digging into things beneath Big Brother's watchful gaze. So, really, the choice was trivial at best.

He took Peter's deal and smiled while they went around and showed him that everything was exactly as he left it, yes, down to the book he'd left on his desk at the office; yes, down to the sheets on his bed at June's; down to, yes, Mozzie waiting for him, ready to dive into the question of who'd ruined his life today. It took him a couple nights before he woke up in a cold sweat, frantically trying to separate dreams from reality from remembered reality because June's apartment had already been shuffled into the mental folder marked _Past_ and reasoning out why he was there again took more out of him than he'd admit to anyone.

* * *

It took–

_(Neal, do not do this.)_

Okay, so maybe he got a little lost, in there.

Maybe, maybe he looked at the wreckage of the plane and thought fast when the guard there found him, maybe he could remember its gutted shape and the absence of the smell of smoke and the pieces that kept almost looking like charred remains but weren't remains, but maybe those memories were a little crystalline, and maybe they felt like they belonged with someone else.

It took a few months before _(you're not a killer)_ they had Adler in their sights (oh, but wasn't he _just_ ), and Adler was almost like Fowler redux, but with bullets where bureaucratic nonsense had been. Bullets and semtex and dynamite and drydocks, and _he killed Kate_ , and _(you were the closest thing to a son I ever had)_.

Neal was developing a few reservations around the concept of "father".

Especially when the next things to come were a concussion of red heat and a gun between his eyes and he didn't even have time to _think_ , not really, before Adler was crumpling in front of him and there came the cavalry, here defined as Peter, once again. Ever reliable. And damn, it was reassuring to have him there right when a little stability would go a long way – except then Peter turned on him, and Neal had _no_ idea why.

One moment he was the same steadying influence as always, a comforting point of reference against the furnace-blast heat of the burning warehouse, and the next Neal was wishing he had that to fall back on because Peter had snapped back to the angriest he'd ever seen him, the framed diamond heist but writ large, Fowler arresting Elizabeth but here Neal was here to see it, like Peter'd read Neal's initials in the plumes of smoke or something.

Like things weren't screwed up enough.

Neal didn't know exactly what he said until he thought back a few days later – thought it was something like _go to hell_ , realized later that _prove it_ was probably worse – and by then he had the warehouse key, knew about the scrap of painting, the casual sacrifice of his things. The realization that, oh, okay, then. Mozzie had framed him. Not intentionally, but the results had been the same.

Even if New York and the deal with the anklet hadn't been completely burned, he could see that it was burning. It was nice, in a way. Usually, he didn't see these things coming.

* * *

Standing on June's balcony, facing the Chrysler Building and the expanse of Central Park, he nursed a glass of wine and waited for Mozzie to come up with their exit strategy. There was part of him that wanted to be angry, but he didn't feel it. Just a sick sense of inevitability.

Given enough time, the house _always_ burned down.

_Home isn't for guys like us_ , Mozzie liked to say. _But we'll take our score, we'll move somewhere in the Tropics, somewhere without a US extradition treaty, where we can sip mai tais on beaches devoid of natural predators, and when the heat dies down after a couple of years..._

But it was Peter Burke chasing him already, and he could hear his own voice in his ears: _Do you honestly think the heat will die down?_

Working day by day, he caught himself thinking _Maybe I'm not ready to leave._ And the suspicious edge that never quite left Peter's eyes seemed to whisper back, _has that ever, ever mattered?_

He caught himself thinking, _I like it here. This is home._

But home had suddenly meant smiling through a three-hour interrogation and knowing that Peter was working against him and he was working against Peter and that something was already broken. Home was suddenly a dead-end road into jail.

So he smiled, and cracked inside, and made his plans.


	5. NYC to NYC

**(v) NYC to NYC**

It took almost no time at all for him to start catching himself on the splinters of those plans.

Like: he used Sara and he used Christie and hell, he used Diana, dancing his way into her apartment on chutzpah and charm, and didn't get a hell of a lot out of it, and the next day as he was keeping up appearances, Peter walked over and congratulated him on it.

"If you know how Christie and Diana met," Peter said, "you are officially part of the family."

_That_ hurt. It reflected back a microcosm, lies within lies within lies, so far down that he wasn't sure if there was a kernel of truth they clung to, any more. He half-wondered if Peter knew how far down they went – no, he'd just conned his way in like he conned his way into everything; no, there wasn't any family here, and he was on his way out anyway. Half-wondered if Peter was just twisting the knife.

Like: Half a week later, with Peter by then certainly working against his plans for escape and still somehow the only person, Mozzie included, that Neal would trust with Mozzie's life, Mozzie turned back from the balcony and the view of Manhattan which were seeming a bit more ephemeral with every night that passed. Mozzie said, "I know how hard it is to give up everything. I couldn't do it. I kept a part of Jeffries with me, and I know I'm lucky I get to do that." And, with a pointed, sad look, "I know your connection to the FBI. But it's not who we are."

There were plenty of things Neal could have said to that. Maybe, _I know_ , because he could recognize a pattern, after all. Maybe Peter's old standby: _People can change_. Or, _Come on, Mozzie, we can make anything true if we try hard enough_. Maybe just, _I hate this. This is ridiculous. This isn't fair._

It was probably for the best that he didn't get a chance to say any of them. They were all equally useless, and life was never fair.

Like: he stood as a witness while Peter gave Elizabeth the wedding they should have had, and the sentiment _should have had, should have had, should have had_ ran circles in his mind until he obliterated half a bottle of Syrah and reminded himself that Kate was gone, and she'd never get less gone, and he'd moved on from her, he had. Just like he'd move on from Sara, right? And New York, and everything else he could think of.

Like: Sara drew a line between them. _You live in the clouds_ , she said, and that was that, sentence rendered, there was no hope for them.

* * *

Like: Keller started sniffing around the periphery of the city like a shark sensing blood in the water. Neal couldn't imagine a time when _that_ wouldn't be the beginning of the end.

* * *

The difference – one of the many, many differences – between Keller and Mozzie was that Mozzie regarded Neal's life in New York with the kind of reserved, uneasy pity of a friend regarding another friend's terminal disease. Keller regarded it with outright scorn.

Keller also took the nuclear option when it came to blasting that life apart.

* * *

"You know, I'm disappointed," Keller said, and Neal practiced distant disinterest with every speck of focus he could muster. Arguing with Keller never worked, and ignoring him never worked, so the best strategy was usually to try to weather his abrasiveness and try to keep him from shooting you. It was a strategy Neal was still working on. "I was expecting some fight. Some challenge. You, though – you were a sitting duck."

They were assembling the pieces of what was meant to be a hidden compartment in the back of a military cargo truck, and part of Neal wanted to know where and how Peter was acquiring one. It was a small part, compared to the parts that wanted the situation never to have happened, Keller never to have caught the scent of the treasure, Mozzie to have never stolen it, Adler to have never learned of it, the Germans never to have scuttled it, Hitler never to have risen to power and the Germanic tribes never to have migrated down out of Scandinavia.

"It's like you're not even trying, any more."

"The treasure was never my project," Neal said. It had just... happened to him. In a way that multibillion-dollar scores didn't just _happen_ to most people.

"You knew about it," Keller said. "Why the hell didn't you make it yours?"

"It's that simple, to you," Neal said.

Keller actually stopped work for a moment, a blowtorch hefted in his hands like it was of no particular concern. Neal sidled away on general principle.

"Yeah," Keller said. "Why wouldn't it be?"

Mozzie saw a reflection of himself when he looked at Neal, and tried to nudge that reflection more in line with the choices he had made. Maybe Keller was the same way, except his version of nudging involved more car crashes and bullet wounds and home invasions.

Mozzie, at least, understood concepts like _loyalty_. Neither one of them quite got _home_.

Peter arrived with one large truck – honestly, Neal hadn't known they'd made trucks in those dimensions; except for a brief stint as an admiral at a reception, he tended to stay away from military concerns – and as his soles hit the ground, he looked across the garage to Neal and Keller. There wasn't a lot of differentiation, in that gaze.

When the initial outbursts were over, Peter had been worryingly civil to everyone – him, Mozzie, _Keller_. Neal suspected it was just that Elizabeth was involved, and nothing, especially not something as paltry as rage, would get between Peter and finding her. Once this was over, he fully expected Keller to end up in jail or dead, and himself – well, hopefully just to end up in jail.

_Reliable_. He'd chosen to stay in New York. New York didn't give a damn what he wanted.

* * *

After conning the NYPD and taking a blow to the head and thwarting Keller and getting a busted rib and some really impressive contusions for his trouble, he was almost looking forward to some time alone in the prison infirmary when Peter looked at him with an expression that almost looked lost, and said, _You could be a free man._ It took some time before that sunk in.

Keller and the US Department of Justice, accidentally colluding to wipe away his sins. He could honestly say he never would have seen _that_ coming.

And yeah, that was conditional, how forgiving was Peter feeling that day, how far did he think the bounds of official responsibility stretched, but then he quietly decided against throwing Neal to the wolves and that was _something_ , at least. Peter always went just a little bit further than anyone else in the system ever had.

Neal was beginning to think he could stay when it all blew up in his face.

* * *

Well. Not with a bang. The usual whimper. Rather, with a glance caught across a public pavilion, a subtle shake of the head and an expression that said, _no chance left here. Get out while you can._ And he caught it, and nodded, signaled back _message understood_ , but all the way back to June's house something in his chest was clawing against it. Because that wasn't fair, violation of the rules, cruel and unusual and unexpected because, yeah, home had vanished, home had burned, he'd been removed from home in cuffs, but until now home had never _told_ him to leave.

But there was no mistaking that deep-set rage in Peter's eyes.

So he called Mozzie and gave the word. He slipped the metal snips around the anklet that was supposed to have kept him tethered here – such a flimsy assurance, when he stopped to look at it – and pulled the bag he kept packed out of its hidehole and vanished into the pressing crowds of New York City, his exodus just his arrival in reverse.

Would have been nice if everything could have been so clean. If he could have pulled out the knot of his time there like a needle slipping back out through its hole, leaving no trace of thread behind. Maybe he could just vanish, and Peter would never remember to search for him, and their trail would go cold as a nor'easter pouring along the coast.

Sitting in a hastily-wrangled business-class seat on a flight to nowhere in particular, to some random stopover where they'd toss down a red herring and be on a flight or a boat or a train again, he put his head back and tried to shove everything down inside and Mozzie was kind enough to let him. Part of him wanted to punch out the plane window and get sucked out into the sky, but that was the kind of thing that only happened in movies – and anyway, he wasn't interested in dying at all, and certainly not by hypothermia and asphyxiation at thirty thousand feet. He might want to make something dramatic happen, something dramatic and shattering, but now they were on the run and their success depended on avoiding dramatics whenever possible.

Three draining days later they set up on Cape Verde in a sprawling mansion of a villa which Mozzie promised would be merely the base for their continuing adventures, even if those adventures had to wait three, five, seven years until the heat died down. But this had already been _the_ big score, and Mozzie was talking about retirement in the same breath as those _Maybe, five years from now_ dreams.

Neal was looking at the excess of white marble and thinking that maybe if he stayed too long, something had to happen to push him away. Mozzie kept telling him: people like them didn't get homes and happy endings. He kept not asking what made them different, these things Mozzie offered in their place.

* * *

_Home is where you make it_ , Mozzie said; and sometimes _home is where you hang your hat – you, particularly_ , and often _home is an illusion. But this is a pretty good one_. And it was, for what it was.

* * *

"This isn't healthy, you know," Mozzie said, and Neal raised an eyebrow.

"Says the person drinking at seven o'clock in the morning."

"Yes, well." Mozzie came around the balcony chair, champagne in one hand and a juicer in the other. Neal guessed that there was an essentially homeopathic amount of orange juice in it; Mozzie had waxed poetic the other night on June's board games and mimosas when he'd had too much rum in him, and now, coming down from that, Neal suspected they both wanted to leave that memory behind them. Almost-straight champagne. Hard as champagne got. "There are no rules left, Neal; might as well enjoy that. You have plans for the afternoon?"

"Thinking of getting to work decorating the place," Neal said, folding his copy of the _New York Times_. The supplier here got the print copies almost a week behind their release; he was reading news from before they'd left. "I found a great spot for a _Girl with a Pearl Earring_."

"Oh. I found a great art supplier in Santiago," Mozzie said. "Just tell me what you need; I was going to go over for some whittling equipment later today."

"You're taking up whittling?" Neal asked.

Mozzie shrugged. "I imagine I'll have plenty of time for new hobbies. What about you? Have your eye on any new pastimes?"

"Hadn't thought about it," Neal said. "I don't know. Sailing? Astronomy?"

"Keeping an eye out for little green men," Mozzie said. "A noble pursuit."

Neal gave him a _Really?_ look, which Mozzie was entirely impervious to.

"Do you want me to pick up a telescope while I'm out?" he asked.

"I can get one myself," Neal said. He might as well go out to see what was available, if he even decided to go for it. It might be an idiotic fancy, in any case; it would be nice to think the stars would be constant enough even when he moved from place to place, but the stars were different from the northern hemisphere to the south, and absent in Manhattan altogether.

* * *

The sun rose over the central Atlantic as impartially as it rose over New York City, chasing away a sky more full of stars and illuminating a city less painted in lights. Ten or twelve sunrises in and Neal found himself settling in without intending to – but Mozzie had said it: there were no rules left, and this place seemed set aside from the rest of the flow of the world. Forgotten and unnoticed, somehow. Who was going to look for them here? The one person who'd managed to track him down before had tossed him out here in the first place.

_A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this Earth,_ Mozzie said.

Mozzie had a bottomless wealth of quotes about home, and Neal had put up a _Girl with a Pearl Earring_ on a spot where he could see it and the vast blue expanse of an undifferentiated sea, and he was thinking of putting up a _Mona Lisa_ in the library, and if Mozzie pointed out his fondness for portraits of girls with ambiguous expressions, at least Neal wasn't painting Cubist interpretations of the Manhattan skyline.

For Neal's part, he ran along the shore and let the tides wash out his footprints. He talked with the people in the city and left them with never quite enough information to know him. He added pieces of himself to the decoration in the villa, where "pieces of himself" were defined as forgeries, lovingly constructed to be unidentifiable as his own work. And every time he caught himself looking backward he forced himself to look ahead, until one night under a rolling storm when he got a message on the pager Ellen had left him.

* * *

The lightning was far enough out to be striking the water and not the sand, and the thunder had a degree of threat that Neal wasn't sure was entirely metaphorical. Through all this time Ellen hadn't asked him to contact her this directly, and he couldn't imagine it was for anything good – maybe Kramer had tracked the Raphael back to her, maybe she was going down for receiving stolen goods, maybe Manhattan was burning down behind him and if not for this call he'd only hear about it six days later by the New York Times.

He found the villa's burner and called across the world, waited to hear the click and the static of an open line. "Ellen?"

Ellen was not the one who answered. _"Hi, Neal."_

He almost had to laugh, at that. Here, he was thinking catastrophe; in reality, it was just Peter Burke, tracking him down again. "I guess this makes you three-and-oh."

_"Two-and-one,"_ Peter said. _"I haven't found you yet."_

There was something grounding and familiar about the quips back and forth, for all that distance and uncertainty changed them, made them not quite as steady, unbalanced the rhythm.

_"The DOJ has someone looking for you,"_ Peter said, though apparently Peter wasn't that "he".

"I'm safe here," Neal said. "And I'm happy." He wasn't sure if he was adding that last part for Peter's sake or his own.

Adler had told him, outside that warehouse, _There's nothing sadder than a con man conning himself._ At this point, Neal didn't even know what the con was, any more. Home was the con. Neat, thorough endings were the con. Escape was the con. His life was the con.

"We had a good run," he said.

And Peter said, _"It's not over."_

_Damn it._

"New York and I are over," Neal said, ignoring the stacks of _Times_ sitting in the corner of the library, the crumbling sandcastles in the shape of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the things he'd left behind. There were only a few ways his partnership with Peter could have ended; there was only one way his life in New York could have come to a close. Absolutely, and messily.

But he could tell that Peter didn't believe that.

He won the battle – he said _Goodbye_ , and Peter said _Goodbye_ , and that sounded final enough, from where he was sitting – but by the tone in Peter's voice, he hadn't won the war. Peter Burke did _not_ know how to let go.

Neal did. It was trivially easy, when the world made it unavoidable.

* * *

Which still didn't prepare Neal for seeing Peter in El Café Isleño, because what the hell, and even when Peter _told_ him to run he couldn't just let him run, and also how in hell had he tracked him out to Cape Verde in the first place, and also _what the hell?_ Neal was beginning to think he could flee to the International Space Station, and Peter would be on the next shuttle. Or possibly there without a shuttle.

At least he wasn't wearing the suit this time, either.

The next two days – getting a bear hug from Peter, getting shot in the leg, witnessing Peter break into song at the marina and spin out the most outré plan Hughes (sanely back in New York, and Neal envied him) had apparently heard yet – convinced him, more than anything, that Peter was living in a radically different world than the rest of them, which had an edge of irony given the number of times Peter had accused him and Mozzie of the same thing. But this was just deeply bizarre.

_He traveled halfway around the world on an unsanctioned manhunt to track us down, and now he's trying to move heaven and Earth to bring you back to New York_ , Mozzie had said. And while the reasons Peter gave – making things right, balancing the scales, approximating some level of justice – were Peter, through and through, Neal still wasn't sure he understood what had happened by the time he was sitting on a plane and looking forward to professional medical care (with sterilized equipment and everything).

The wound in his leg was throbbing and the rest of his body ached with the unaddressed stress of life without safety, no rest, looking over one shoulder and trying to get away, but at least he could sit down again, now. He wasn't running any more, and even if that was just because he'd been shot, caught, and arrested, the game was up. When that was all you had in the way of downtime, you took it.

He took an aisle seat, because he didn't want to watch Cape Verde shrink to nothing in the window and get left behind, the way everything got tossed behind him. St. Louis, a hundred hotel rooms and flats and villas scattered across Europe, New York – but this was the first leg of the journey _back_ to New York. He kept finding his way back there, and maybe someday he'd have to face the significance of that.

Maybe one of these days he'd have to let it sink in that Peter had talked to Ellen, and the two of them had conspired to drag him back to the city he'd run from. He'd burned St. Louis and any chance at commutation, and yet. The two of them.

It might all be for nothing. History said it would be. Their best efforts couldn't stop Kramer or Collins; never could stop him from jumping into something that burned him, his bridges, and everyone around.

This could still all fall apart.

But wouldn't it be something if it didn't?

He didn't realize he'd been staring at Peter until Peter looked over, raised his eyebrows, and said "You okay?"

"I never thanked you for coming," Neal said. _Not once._ The closest he'd come was that storage unit, after the first three-year chase: _Thank you. I never would have found her without you._ And he'd balk at admitting it to Mozzie, but it meant something, knowing he'd be searched for when he disappeared.

Peter got that odd look on his face, like he was half-proud to see Neal employing some facet of proper socialization, and half-embarrassed to be having this conversation. "You don't need to," he said.

"Still," Neal said.

Peter breathed out, gave him a lopsided smile, and reached across the aisle to plant a wordless hand on his shoulder. After a couple seconds he squeezed down and pulled his hand back, like he was worried about violating some unspoken rule of masculinity or FBI-appropriate behavior or them-appropriate behavior or just Peter Burke-ness, and Neal let himself smile and roll his neck so he was staring aimlessly at the ceiling again.

It was a long flight home, but they got there, in the end.


End file.
